Woke is about race
Analyses of the woke movement that ignore race differences cannot fully explain it.
Written by Bo Winegard.
The woke movement really doesn’t want us to talk about race differences in IQ. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the woke movement’s most ardent critics oblige. They will criticize the woke movement, will attack it, mock it, denigrate it, but they will not talk about race differences. This inevitably leads to an impoverished understanding of wokism, for attempting to understanding wokism without considering race differences is like trying to understand physics without considering gravity.
In a recent example, Michael Shermer wrote a piece about the causes of the rise of woke. While the piece is lucid and plausible as far as it goes, it ignores race differences—or collapses them unhelpfully into a more general category of blank-slate ideology without explicitly mentioning them. The result is a confused analysis constrained by the very taboo that gave rise to the woke movement.
In the piece, Shermer forwards three ultimate causes of wokism, which are related to the woke movement’s “answers to fundamental questions about human nature and the nature of progress.” These are:
Anti-reason historical trends. The rise of progressive postmodernism and neo-Marxism; the rejection of Enlightenment rationality and scientific realism.
Identitarian collectivism. The rejection of liberal individualism and the embrace of tribal identity.
The Blank Slate model of human nature. The rejection of the constrained vision and the embrace of doctrine that all humans can be equal.
Let’s begin with the blank slate ideology, since it is arguably the most central. Shermer is right that the woke movement embraces a strong form of the blank slate thesis. Still, it is a selective version. The woke do not deny the influence of genetics entirely. In fact, many adherents accept that homosexuality is genetically influenced. And increasingly, they appear to regard trans identity the same way.
What is more, while many in the woke movement reject the idea that genetic differences contribute meaningfully to disparities in status or income, they do not typically destroy the careers of those who explore individual genetic variation, nor have they succeeded in cancelling behavioral genetics classes from major universities. The progressive Kathryn Paige Harden even wrote an entire book about the importance of genes to social outcomes. And though she was criticized by some in her political tribe, she was celebrated by others.
The statement, “I believe that individual differences in intelligence are caused partially by genetics” is not shocking or racy and even progressive outlets such as Vox accept it.
No, the woke movement is not primarily driven by a denial of individual differences. It is driven by a denial of racial differences. Its bête noire is race realism. And it emerged largely in response to the perceived failures of the civil rights movement.
Most of those who opposed Jim Crow and other forms of overt racism in the 1950s and 60s were sincere equalitarians. They believed that blacks and whites possessed the same innate potential for success. And thus they held that large racial disparities were caused by racism, not by differences in intelligence or temperament. Once the manacles of anti-black racism were broken, equality would naturally follow.
When this expected racial equality failed to materialize, civil rights activists encouraged more intrusive and proactive efforts to equalize the races and searched more diligently for subtle or hidden causes of racial disparities. If not overt racism, then perhaps the source of the disparities was structural racism, implicit racism, or some hitherto unknown racism that pervaded the United States like a transparent fog.
Simultaneously, civil rights activists enthusiastically rejected any explanation that pointed to genotypic or even phenotypic differences between blacks and whites in socially important traits. The mere speculation that such differences existed was condemned as racist. Equalitarianism, already ascending in popularity, became the regnant view. Racial equality was accepted as a fundamental dogma from the far left to the respectable right. Dissenters were denounced as heretics and increasingly vilipended. In time, they were removed from mainstream discourse altogether. What began as a laudable effort to eradicate overt racism ended in a zealously illiberal movement fundamentally at odds with reality.
And because it was at odds with reality, it became more and more dependent on censorship and moral bullying. When the truth is not on your side, open inquiry becomes an existential threat.
As its original goals proved unreachable, the civil rights movement transmogrified into a kind of racial Marxism whose mission was to create racial equality by any means necessary, including coercion. Moreover, as it achieved a certain prestige, it attracted charlatans, grifters, and power mongers who saw it as a vessel for their own success. White elites joined and displayed their moral righteousness through conspicuous racial effacement, while black elites basked in the unearned status and resources.
In his essay, Shermer wrote:
This widely-held belief holds that, since people are inherently equal, any inequalities in education, health, wealth, income, housing, home ownership, employment, crime, imprisonment, and the like, can only be the result of discrimination rather than inherent inequalities. Once such discriminatory policies are eliminated, blank slaters believe, such outcome inequalities should disappear.
But this is wrong. Most people in the woke movement do not think that poverty in West Virginia is caused by anti-white discrimination. Nor do they think that men are imprisoned more than women because of pervasive misandry. By framing woke about individual differences and not race or sex differences, Shermer misrepresents it. A more accurate passage would read:
This widely-held belief holds that, since races are inherently equal, any racial disparities in education, health, wealth, income, housing, home ownership, employment, crime, imprisonment, and the like, can only be the result of discrimination rather than inherent racial inequalities. Once such discriminatory policies are eliminated, equalitarians believe, such outcome inequalities should disappear.
Acknowledging that much of woke ideology is rooted in the (erroneous) belief that all racial groups possess equal average cognitive abilities is essential. This recognition clarifies the movement’s core priorities and helps explain how the other tendencies Shermer identifies (e.g., anti-rationalism and identitarian collectivism) are often fueled by, or at least intensified by, this foundational assumption.
Postmodernism, neo-Marxism, and other relativist frameworks continue to exert influence in the humanities and among woke advocates because they assert that science is inherently value-laden and institutionally biased. This outlook enables the rejection of robust empirical findings, such as the well documented black-white IQ gap, because, after all, inquiries into race differences are relics of colonialist and racist ideologies. The very investigation itself is racist. And this protects the dogma of racial equality from critical examination.
And identitarian collectivism is inevitable in a movement whose raison d'être is to equalize racial groups, since that very goal requires seeing the world through the lens of race. This is especially true when the races are not equal1 because it means that racial equality will remain elusive. Outcome disparities will persist in perpetuity and woke advocates will always blame anti-black racism (or anti-POC) racism for them. The social world will forever be divided into racial groups who compete against each other for limited resources.
Of course, the woke movement cares about more than racial equality. It cares about women, trans, gay and other supposed victims of hegemonic male whiteness. But more than anything, it is driven by race. What is more, although many mainstream intellectuals are prepared to disagree with the woke movement’s dogma that racial disparities are evidence of racism, they are not prepared to disagree—at least publicly—with its dogma that the races are equal. And thus the woke movement triumphs even as its more extremist views have been discredited, for most of its critics still bend their knee before its ultimate sacred value.
Bo Winegard is an Editor of Aporia.
Support Aporia with a paid subscription:
You can also follow us on Twitter.
I mean, of course, in a physical, cognitive sense. I do not mean in a metaphysical or legal sense. One can assert that “men and women are equal” in a legal sense while also pointing out that they are obviously unequal in many other ways, including in upper body strength.
“The statement, “I believe that individual differences in intelligence are caused partially by genetics” is not shocking or racy and even progressive outlets such as Vox accept it.”
Vox agrees superficially and only with the generalized statements. If you start to dive into specifics, they’ll clarify where they stand real fast.
And yes, after the reaction to Murray’s The Bell Curve, which is still occurring 31 years later, no one is going to publish research in that vain again.
What is ironic is that the equalitarians, as you put it, are the ones DEMANDING to know why groups aren’t equal and why the “global south” is poor.
They forced people like me to find answers that make sense, so I looked at culture, recent history of colonization, geography, resources, discrimination, political history, religion. The only thing that has overwhelming explanatory power to predict all the relevant trend lines (GDP per capita, crime, education) is finding the thing that causes people of proximal geographic origins to cluster together in predictable ways, even when they move around the globe through migration.
It’s not magic dirt, so it has to be something else. I used to be content with cultural or anti colonial explanations but the equalitarians kept pushing the issue and made me think about it a lot more deeply. To their absolute loss.